When high school students, working at their school’s paper, do a better job of scrutinizing an administrator’s credentials than the people charged with hiring him or her, then you know there is a teacher doing something right.
Which is why this article about a group of student journalists in Pittsburg, Kansas, who did exactly that, is cool as hell.
“A gross trifling with every fine feeling…. Mr. Clemens has no reliable sense of propriety.”
Springfield Republican
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
Because several of my students asked for it, here is a learning support on using pronoun contractions with the present tense of the verb to be.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Here are all the faults of Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Bronte) are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.”
James Lorimer, North British Review
“…wild, disjointed and improbable…the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer.”
The Examiner
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.”
Helen Keller (1880-1968)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“Since Mrs. Buck does not understand the meaning of the Confucian separation of man’s kingdom from that of woman, she is like someone trying to write a story of the European Middle Ages without understanding the rudiments of chivalric standards and the institution of Christianity.”
New Republic
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged literary oddities, readings/research
“Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“That this book is strong and that Miss Chopin has a keen knowledge of certain phases of the feminine will not be denied. But it was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and poetic grace to enter the overworked field of sex fiction.”
Chicago Times-Herald
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
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“Excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism.”
Oprah Winfrey (1954-)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer…is marriageableness…. Suicide is more respectable.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, 1961
“Mama says that she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers.”
Mary Russell Mitford, letter to Sir William Etford, 1815
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
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